Although Woodrow Wilson initially urged the country to be “impartial in thought as well as in action” in 1914, by the time the United States finally entered the First World War in 1917 he had failed to steer the country on a neutral course. The country accepted the president's idea that the United States should remain neutral when war broke out in Europe in 1914. Yet Wilson contradicted himself about what it meant for the United States to practice neutrality. In doing so, he led the country into that conflict on the highest moral, if unrealistic, grounds and reinforced the Faustian substructure of American diplomacy that would remain in place for the remainder of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.